


Remember Me, As I Will You

by alpha_exodus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Auror Harry Potter, Crups (Harry Potter), Grief/Mourning, H/D Pet Fair 2016, HP: EWE, M/M, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Missing Persons, Open Ending, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pensieves, Post-Hogwarts, Potions Master Draco Malfoy, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:14:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8174591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpha_exodus/pseuds/alpha_exodus
Summary: Two weeks, Harry'd said, two weeks and he'd be done with the assignment. But the longer Draco waits, the harder it is to believe that Harry is going to return alive.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This ended at quite a different place than I expected it to in the beginning, but it felt fitting. I deviated slightly from the prompt time period wise, but I'd like to think it still fits that vein of thought! Much love to FeelsforBreakfast and SummerFrost for the beta work <3
> 
> For [Prompt #6](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Td1Xj4ZNIqFDdQLtMpkOWEqn2hI5TEx8tEtrEU1u1U8/edit).

“Here—no, _here_ , you fucking codger—look, do you want the treat or not? _Merlin_ , see if I give you any more after that!” Draco huffs, shoving the treat bag back into the cupboard with enough force that it knocks over two of the Chipfurzle potion vials sitting next to it, and he scrambles to catch them. He manages to grab one but fumbles the other and it smashes directly into the floor, bright purple potion oozing over the tiles. Leo, the culprit of this whole fiasco, lurches forward to lap at the mess, forked tail wagging gaily. “Oh—fucking—you’re not supposed to _drink_ it, that’s for your _fur—_ “ Draco groans exasperatedly, throwing his hands up in the air. “Well, fine—that can’t taste good, but it won’t hurt you. You were due for another treatment anyway.”

Resigned, he Reparos the smashed vial before Leo can step in the broken glass, levitating it over to the sink. Then he leans against the counter and rubs at his temples in annoyance. He’s feeling a headache coming on, and he’s fairly sure he’s out of headache potions—and they take _days_ to brew, fucking hell. His morning’s already gone pear-shaped.

He jumps at the sound of paws skittering across the tile, looking up to see the other two crups come running in. They push Leo away to slurp at what’s left of the mess, and Leo makes a wounded noise, looking up at Draco as if he could change their minds. “No,” he says firmly, “You weren’t supposed to get into that in the first place.”

Leo whimpers, laying on the floor at Draco’s feet, and Draco reaches down and scratches him on the head. Leo’s his favorite, even if he’d never admit that outright. He’s the only one who still has a forked tail—it’s technically illegal to leave them on, but the pet shop owners had found him far too late to remove the extra tail without causing him grief, so on it had stayed.

The other two are more Harry’s than Draco’s. Well, technically they’re _all_ Harry’s—Harry had wheedled Draco until he’d caved on letting him buy them. Honestly, this had been far less horrifying than the alternative talk of having offspring, so Draco doesn’t really regret it.

But he can still resent them. Especially as the other two—Cassie and Orion—finish lapping at the potion and start enthusiastically jumping up on Draco—“No! Down! Ah, shite, bloody buggers,” he huffs—and now he has to put on a new lab coat because they’ve smeared potion from their muzzles all over his current one, and mixing ingredients is a terrible idea. “Go _away_ ,” he grits out, pushing them off of him. He shakes his head in frustration and stomps upstairs to change.

“ _It’s just a week, Draco. Two weeks max,_ ” Harry had said, and Draco had grumbled that either option was way too long—Harry had promised he wouldn’t take these godawful field assignments anymore, but since when had Draco ever been able to stop him? Harry had kept nagging at him, saying things like, “ _Come on, I’ll be in and out in no time,_ ” and eventually Draco had been so fed up with arguing that he’d shouted, “ _Fine! Do whatever the fuck you want, Potter_ ,” and Harry had glared at him and stomped out of the room.

They’d made up afterwards, but Draco is rapidly growing annoyed again. Two weeks had been yesterday. Technically, it’d been two weeks plus an extra weekend because Draco had been giving him the benefit of the doubt. But it’s been two weeks and Harry isn’t home yet and Harry hasn’t even sent him an owl explaining why.

Draco should be worried, but as it is, he’s just angry. Harry does this every single fucking time, fucks off on assignments and comes back covered in dirt without even a thought to how it makes Draco feel. And Draco knows he tries to keep in touch as often as possible, knows that it can be hard to do especially when Harry’s undercover, but right now Draco’s having a very hard time not chalking it up to simple thoughtlessness.

He stomps down to the kitchen again to put the kettle back on because Merlin knows he needs tea right now. While he’s waiting for the water to boil, he looks around the room, empty now that the crups have fucked off to who knows where—and then he spots Harry’s favorite mug, the one with the crimson stripes, sitting by the sink. It’s still got tea sitting in the bottom of it.

It only takes two steps for Draco to walk over and sweep his arm across the counter, sending the mug flying into the floor just like the potion vials from ten minutes ago, old tea leaves splattering everywhere. But this time, there are no crups to blame the mess on. Just Draco, staring down at the little bits of beige and crimson porcelain on the floor, chest heaving.

Normally this helps him channel his frustration away. But it’s not nearly as satisfying now, glaring at the floor, because Harry’s not around to Reparo it.

The kettle goes off. Draco gives a frustrated groan and turns to swish the burner off, accidentally stepping on a piece of porcelain in the process—“Fucking _Merlin!_ ” he yelps as the shard pierces his foot. He hops carefully away from the glass, using his wand to pull the porcelain from his skin, then Scourgifies the shard and spelling the mug back together from a respectable distance away. Levitating it back to the sink, he Vanishes the leftover tea leaves. Then he pours his own mug of tea and meanders back down to his potions lab, fuming.

He’s having a bad day. Bad days generally turn into good days in the end, because Harry comes home from work and takes note of his mood and immediately offers to cook dinner. And then usually he gives Draco a backrub, one that devolves very quickly into the sensual kind of sex that Draco honestly adores when he’s feeling vulnerable like this, the kind where Harry gazes warmly into his eyes as he presses into him. And then Harry tells him he loves him, over and over, until Draco’s chest is brimming with it, until he has no choice but to say it back.

But Harry isn’t here, so Draco has to make his own dinner. His bed is cold when he settles in to go to sleep that night.

xXx

A twinge in the wards has Draco pausing as he decants his final potion for the day. His brow wrinkles as he labels the vial, stowing it neatly in a box with twelve others just like it before removing his lab coat as he thumps upstairs. Who’s calling at this hour? His heart jumps—it can’t be Harry, of course, because Harry has a key, but maybe it’s at least news of him.

It’s been three weeks total. One week since Harry was due back, and still no word.

The crups skitter toward the front entrance as he reaches the foyer. He orders them toward their kennel, and for once they go peacefully; he’s learned the hard way that they’ll immediately make a break for it if he so much as thinks about opening the door while they’re out. He locks the kennel up, then heads for the door, reaching it just as a knock sounds from the other side. Heart pounding, he opens it to find—oh.

“Hullo, Draco,” Hermione says, giving him a strange look. She’s holding a casserole dish that shimmers with the faint outline of a warming charm, arms extended in front of her past the swell in her stomach that Draco’s still not quite used to.

“Hullo, Hermione. Ron,” he nods to Ron behind her, swallowing down the disappointment that it’s not in fact someone with information on Harry.

And—he can’t believe he’s forgotten to cancel their weekly Sunday dinner. It’d slipped his mind, he supposes; he prefers to work a little bit every day, so time loses its meaning when Harry’s not lazing around on the weekends, helping him tell the difference between the days.

“Draco?” Hermione prompts, and Draco jolts from his thoughts. They’re still standing awkwardly in the doorway.

“Sorry—come in,” he motions, stepping back so they can enter.

Ron takes one look at the kitchen, kept immaculate as Draco likes it (except for Harry’s crimson mug, still sitting by the counter—Harry can clean that up himself) and murmurs, “Harry’s not back yet, is he?”

“No,” Draco says sharply. Then he forces himself to exhale slowly—he’s no longer allowed to take out his frustration on other people, he tells himself. He has Harry for that, usually, and even with Harry he’s been getting better at not doing it at all. “No, he isn’t,” he lets his voice soften as he puts the kettle on. “Sorry, it slipped my mind that we had plans for tonight—I would’ve prepared something ahead of time. I’ll see if I can make up some side dishes.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem at all,” Hermione says, even though Draco is perfectly aware that Hermione has had an insatiable appetite as of late. _A side effect of eating for two_ , Harry would say, and then, _aren’t you glad we don’t have to go through that?_

And they won’t have to, even if Harry eventually gets his way about having kids. Harry’s always pushed for adoption, after all.

Draco pokes around the cold cupboard, charmed to stay cool year-round. He finds the makings for a veggie medley and then sets his knife to chopping, sitting down at his usual place at the table where Hermione and Ron are already relaxing. They’re doing that _thing_ , the one where they have a silent conversation with their eyes (and something that Draco and Harry have never truly mastered through all five years of their relationship, which of course means that it bothers Draco immensely). “Well? Out with it,” he prompts them, raising an eyebrow, and both of them have the decency to look embarrassed.

“Has he owled?” Hermione speaks, then winces as the baby assumedly kicks inside her. Her arms come up to idly pat her stomach as she waits for an answer.

“No,” Draco looks away, “Not really. He sent one letter, but that was a week into his assignment, and it seemed like everything was going fine.”

Hermione’s brow wrinkles. “Can we see it?”

“Sorry—I Vanished it,” Draco lies. He’s not quite sure why he lies, only that it has something to with some misplaced feeling of possessiveness over Harry, one that still lingers even though he’d learned to trust Hermione and Ron over three years ago.

Hermione sighs, and Ron pats her arm and says, “It’s all right, ‘Mione. It probably wasn’t important.”

Damn it—Hermione might have been able to glean something useful from the contents of the letter. Draco shouldn’t have lied. But as it is, there’s another option, so he reluctantly opens his mouth and says, “I remember what it said, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Verbatim?” Hermione looks at him curiously.

“Ah—yes,” Draco responds, fighting the flush that threatens to bloom on his cheeks. The letter is sitting on his nightstand. He’s read it probably a dozen times since he’d received it. “It wasn’t very long,” he adds in explanation.

“Go on, then,” Ron says.

Distantly, Draco hears the knife clatter to the counter as it finishes chopping his vegetables, and he stands and pulls out a pan along with butter from the cold cabinet. He flicks the stove on and butters the pan as he recites the words he wishes he didn’t know by heart.

“ _D - I hope the past week hasn’t dragged on too long without me. I expect we’ll be here no more than a few days longer, we’re very close to wrapping this up. Everything’s going well. Thank you for trusting me. H._ ” Draco omits a few lines, the ones where Harry says _I love you_ and _I can’t wait to touch you when I get back_ , because those are for Draco and Draco alone.

The ‘we’ in ‘we’re’ is referring to Harry’s new partner, the too-young Hufflepuff that had replaced Ron when Ron had stepped down from the Aurors on paternity leave. Draco’s loath to admit it, but he trusts Ron to keep Harry safe, especially compared to Gary or whatever his name is. Draco has been trying very hard not to resent Ron for leaving, for stepping out of a role where he could have protected Harry and brought him back home on time. Most of the time Draco succeeds.

“That doesn’t really give us anything to go off of,” Hermione sighs.

Ron hums in agreement. “Hm, what was that about trusting you?” he sets his elbows on the table.

Draco scrapes the vegetables into the pan and begins sautéing them. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to go into this, but if it would give them some sort of clue about what’s happened to Harry, that’s more important than hiding his ugly emotions. “We’d fought. I didn’t want him taking these long assignments any longer. He still wanted to go,” his nose wrinkles.

“Ugh,” Hermione makes a noise, and Draco only has to glance at the sheepish expression on Ron’s face to deduce that they’ve had a very similar row.

“The time before this was supposed to be the last one,” Draco sighs. “As you can see, it wasn’t. Part of me wonders if he’s just gallivanting across the country while he still can.”

“He wouldn’t,” Ron defends, “Not without telling you.”

“He might be avoiding it if he’s feeling guilty,” Hermione muses.

“Naw, Harry’s more responsible than that! He—“

“What’s my alternative then?” Draco cuts in huffily. Both Ron and Hermione stare at him, and he shakes his head and mutters, “Sorry. Just—he’s never been gone this long beyond schedule. I’d rather be angry than worry about him.”

“Sorry, mate,” Ron looks down at the table. “I s’pose I didn’t think about it like that. But he’ll be all right, yeah? And Garrett’s a good bloke. Strong defensive instinct. I’m sure it’s just taking longer than expected to round up the suspects.”

Ah, Garrett—that’s the Hufflepuff’s name, then. Draco promptly forgets it. “I don’t even know what he’s out there doing,” he grumbles. “He won’t tell me anything useful until after they’ve done the debriefing.”

“I dunno either, mate. I’ve been out of the loop since I left,” Ron shakes his head.

“Doesn’t it feel awful?” Hermione raises an eyebrow at him. “Not knowing what he’s up to is hard, isn’t it? Almost makes you want to, say, I don’t know, keep your wife better updated when you’re on the job, huh?”

Ron groans. “Yeah, all right, point taken. Sorry, ‘Mione.”

Normally Draco is amused by their squabbling. Tonight, however, it just makes him ache for Harry, for the little eye rolls that Harry sends his way when they’re not looking and the gentle press of Harry’s foot against his when they’re sitting down at the table.

He checks the vegetables and finds that they’re done. Trying desperately to stop thinking about Harry’s absence, he lets Ron and Hermione’s voices wash over him as he spells the burner off.

xXx

Draco is sitting on his side of the sofa and watching the wizarding-enhanced telly, an empty space beside him where Harry should be. Where Harry isn’t. The crups are in the floor, Leo lolling on his side—he’s a bit older than the other two and so isn’t as well inclined to roughhousing. Cassie and Orion are playing their usual game, circling each other in a good-natured attempt to start wrestling. Draco lets them be. He’s used to the noise anyway, since Harry certainly makes enough of it, muttering to himself as he goes over case files with the tip of a quill in his mouth.

If Draco blinks hard enough, he can almost see Harry there, spread out over the cushions, files and all. He can feel Harry slowly sneaking his feet into Draco’s lap, even though Draco tries to swat them away. Harry always grins at that.

He blinks again, and the memory dissolves. Now there’s just the sofa and Draco and the crups on the floor.

xXx

Draco likes his job, he reflects as he dices a dried Mandrake root. He runs an owl order potions shop under a pseudonym, and the job is comforting in its anonymity; he doesn’t have to worry about stepping out of the house, about worried chatter and mutters of _look, there’s the last living Death Eater_. He likes brewing, the hiss of the cauldron as he scrapes the root into it, the way the potion turns a murky purple on contact. He likes having his own space and likes being mostly alone, likes not having to bother with small talk like he would in a traditional workplace, not to mention the convenient option of taking a nap if he deems one necessary.

But there comes a point when he gets a little stir crazy being alone in the house, and at four weeks since Harry’s absence had begun, he’s most certainly reached that point.

Four weeks. The number buzzes around in his head, four weeks, four fucking weeks. It’s very nearly a month and Harry’s not back yet.

A bizarre part of Draco’s mind wonders if Harry had been having some sort of affair and has simply eloped. But try as he might, Draco can’t make himself believe it. Harry dotes on him, smiles at him more than necessary, blows up at him right when Draco needs someone to push back against his temperamental moods, and it’s unconventional but also perfect, the way their relationship works. Draco doesn’t think—well, he certainly hopes against it—that Harry would be looking for anything more.

No, he doesn’t think so at all.

He can’t shake the feeling that there’s something awfully, terribly wrong.

Finished with his brewing for the day, he carries a box of potion vials up to their makeshift owlery on the back deck. He attaches parcels and checks off orders one by one, gazing idly up at the sky.

There’s a storm brewing.

xXx

It’s Sunday. Draco argues with himself the whole morning about whether or not to owl Hermione and Ron and call dinner off. No doubt the week of Hermione’s due date is drawing nearer; she doesn’t need to be stressing about travel, he tells himself.

That’s the reason he gives for it, at any rate. In reality, he doesn’t think he could bear another dinner with Harry’s friends without Harry actually present. The contrast is too drastic, tension in the air too rough, scraping against the grooved wound left from the constant worrying he’s been doing these days.

In the end, he finally pens the letter, waiting until lunchtime to send it. His owl comes back almost immediately with a response in Hermione’s handwriting: _That’s all right, we won’t come over, then. I’m worried about him._

Draco doesn’t reply. He stares at the word _worried_ until it threatens to blur, and then at that point Cassie is nudging him to go out and Orion isn’t far behind her. Sighing, he spells Hermione’s letter away and goes to get their leashes, grabbing Leo’s too while he’s at it.

He takes them out into their backyard, the space breezy and open, no houses within sight. Both he and Harry prefer being out here in the countryside; it deters paparazzi on Harry’s part and means that there are no neighbors to possibly give Draco nasty looks. He thinks it helps them both feel safe.

The summer sun is blazing high in the sky, sending sweat trickling down Draco’s neck within mere minutes of being outside. He wipes it off, debating on whether or not to cast a cooling charm on himself, but he ends up letting it be. He spends enough time in the coolness of the house as it is. There’s some sort of comfort to be found in the suffocating heat, the kind that reminds him of sitting and watching his mother garden as a young child.

Mother. He should visit her, he knows, but he’s been putting it off. He’d seen her for his birthday and that had been recent enough for him, back when Harry was still around—he’d left hardly a week after that visit.

And he and Harry always go together. It’s a burden Draco’s not sure he can handle without Harry’s hand clutched tightly in his own.

There’s a yank at his hand, and for one brief, heart-stopping second, he thinks it’s Harry, home and tugging at him—but no, it’s just the crups at their leashes, begging to go free. He sighs and spells up the crup perimeter around the yard before letting them go—they could leave it up all the time, but Harry insists that the shimmering gets in the way of his view of the sky.

Leo trots over immediately to sit under the shady grove of trees at the edge of the yard. Cassie and Orion start their strange routine of sniffing at what looks to be completely random places around the yard, finally urinating in adjacent bushes across the yard. Draco sits in one of the patio chairs that they rarely use, taking care to Scourgify it beforehand.

He feels itchy. He wishes he could go somewhere, anywhere other than this house, this yard, but—but. It’s hard, without Harry. It’s hard to face the glares and groans and hexes that abound in the Wizarding world, and he doubts he would even know what to do off by himself among muggles. He recalls Harry talking about some sort of sport where players kick the ball around, but the ball doesn’t even fly and the goal posts are at ground level. Anyway, Draco would have to find other people to play with, and he doesn’t even have enough friends to form a full Quidditch team.

Hmm—he supposes he can count Harry’s friends at his own, at this point. But the only ones he truly feels comfortable being around without Harry are Hermione and sometimes Ron, and even they can be too much at times.

He really should call up Pansy.

Leo trots over to him and puts his paws on Draco’s knee. “Time to go in?” Draco murmurs, and Leo gives a small yip as if he’s agreeing. He very well may be, Draco thinks. Magic tends to do strange things to the animals it’s exposed to, even if they’re innately magical themselves.

He gathers up Cassie and Orion, glancing around the yard—and grudgingly, he spells the magical barrier away. Harry will be cross with him if he leaves it up, after all.

xXx

That night, Draco sits in his living room and starts really, truly wondering if he should make a visit to the Auror department. He could pen a letter but he doesn’t know what good that would do, because odds are they’d simply ignore him. Even nowadays the Auror department tends to get fussy with Draco, even though he hasn’t done anything wrong since he was a teenager, hasn’t stepped a toe out of line for all the time he’s been with Harry.

If he visited—they’d at least have to talk to him, if only to tell him to his face that they won’t release any information.

It makes him wish that Ron was still working in the Auror offices. But if Ron was still working there, he’d be off with Harry—and most likely, he and Harry would both be back by now.

But—oh! He could ask Ron to ask—and the idea seems so urgent in his harried brain that he pushes him off the couch to Floo call them immediately, throwing the powder in the fire and calling out “ _The Weasley-Granger Residence!”_

It’s as his head is twisting through the Floo pathways that he realizes he should have sent an owl.

Hermione’s face appears first. “Is he back?” she asks excitedly, smile bright.

There’s a pang, deep in Draco’s chest, and suddenly he feels like throwing up. “No,” he has to tell her, has to watch her face fall and the way her hands fly protectively to her belly.

“Oh—sorry,” Hermione shakes her head. “I thought—but I suppose he would be the one calling if he were back. Unless he was—oh, never mind,” she dismisses the thought.

Draco thinks he knows what she’d been thinking— _unless he was hurt_. _Unless he was in the hospital, unless he was dying_ —but it hits too close to home because Harry might—Harry could be—

No.

Draco is not even going to consider that.

He clears his throat. “Sorry—I shouldn’t have called so late,” he apologizes.

Hermione quirks her lips at him like she still sometimes does when she catches him saying ‘sorry’, and he gives her a good eye roll just for that. She laughs. “There’s the Draco I know.”

“Shut up,” Draco grumbles.

At that point, Ron shuffles into the room, yawning. “Are you verbally abusing my wife, Malfoy?” There’s no malice in his tone—it’s a statement to how far they’ve all come, Draco thinks.

“No—I’d think rather the opposite,” he defends himself. “Anyway, I was looking for you, actually.”

“Oh?” Ron perks up, and Draco can almost see him put on his serious façade. “What for?”

“I wanted to ask—if it’s not too much of a bother, could you inquire in at the Ministry for details on Harry’s mission?”

From the way Ron’s face immediately falls, Draco thinks he’s going to say no. But instead, Ron opens his mouth and says, “Sorry, mate—I’ve already done that, actually. I was going to bring it up at dinner, actually, or owl you about it once we decided against dinner—but ‘Mione said to leave you be.”

Draco can see Hermione looking rueful in the background, and he sighs. “That’s all right,” his lips twist. “Did they not have any news?”

“Worse. They wouldn’t tell me anything,” Ron’s lips flatten into a thin line. “They’re keeping this assignment very hushed up. Otherwise I’d be privy to anything that Harry is a part of—at least, I would hope so. Technically we’re still partners,” he shrugs.

It takes a lot for Draco to stuff down the horribly impulsive shout that wants to escape from his mouth, the one that sounds like _‘if you were really his partner then you would be out there with him, and you would have brought him home already!_ ’

 _Ron is your friend_ , he has to remind himself, and also _proper time off for childcare is important_. But still. It’s hard to care more about an unborn child than about _Harry,_ about—well, quite honestly, the fucking love of his life, even though that sounds so sappy he instinctively wants to wrinkle his nose at it.

If he didn’t currently have his head through the Floo, he would have reached up to rub at his temples. As it is, he settles for sighing again, looking blearily up at Ron and Hermione with the flames flickering at the edges of his vision. He suddenly feels extraordinarily tired. “They certainly won’t tell me anything if they didn’t even tell you.”

“I wish it wasn’t like that, but I think you’re right,” Ron responds morosely, stepping over to wrap his arm around Hermione.

“He’ll be all right,” Hermione says firmly. “Harry, I mean.”

Hermione usually knows what she’s talking about, Draco reasons as he bids farewell and closes the Floo connection. She’s right about most everything. She has to be right about this.

And then there’s the part of him that thinks of Harry, laughing one night as they’d reminisced about their Hogwarts days, chortling at the fact that “Hermione was always bloody shite at Divination, you know?”

xXx

At four and a half weeks, Draco sits dully at the empty dining room table that they never use, staring at the locked and warded wine cabinet.

He’d made Harry ward it. Harry’s always had stronger innate magic than Draco has, even though it’d infuriated him when they were younger (and still infuriates him sometimes, quite honestly). But this was something he’d wanted Harry to do, purely so that Draco couldn’t undo it. He’ll allow himself to have a glass of wine with dinner sometimes, but only with Harry there, and only when he’s in an undeniably good mood, because otherwise he feels too much like he could spiral out of control.

For the first time in a very long while, he thinks of how they’d first met. Draco had been a certifiable mess, broken over the end of the war and choosing the wrong side, over his father’s death and his mother’s decaying mental state and the prospect of never being able to leave the house again—but most prominently over how everything was undeniable _his fault, his fault, oh God_.

Since then, time has taught him what he can and cannot blame himself for. Time, and Harry, and a good stint of Mind-Healing.

He pushes his chair back, the legs making a scraping noise against the wooden floor. Then he heads up to Harry’s study, shutting the door tightly so the crups can’t get in and flicking the lamps on. The room is littered with case files, covers shimmering with wards that mean Draco couldn’t read them if he tried, so many of them that Draco wonders whether Harry in fact has anything at all in his desk at work. He wouldn’t know—he hasn’t stepped foot in the Ministry since his trials. It reminds him too much of the acrid desperation in his mouth, the silent scream in his lungs at the sentencing of his father—

He won’t think about that now, won’t dwell on it anymore. He’s here on a mission, and that mission involves pulling the dimly glowing Pensieve out of the corner, spelling the dust away and settling down in Harry’s chair. There are already memories in it—Harry’s memories, he thinks, but he respects Harry’s privacy enough that he doesn’t even think of disturbing them. Instead, he draws the thin wisp of a memory out of his own mind with his wand, watching to see that it pools in the basin before pulling out another, another.

When the basin is suitably full, he braces himself and takes the plunge.

He comes out in a room that he’d known well when he was younger, a room that definitively no longer feels like home. It’s slightly jarring to see it as it once was, especially when he knows for a fact that the family that purchased the Manor from the Ministry completely redid the entire interior, but he glances around his childhood room anyway, looks at his past self sitting listlessly on his bed.

Past-Draco—and it’s strange to call him that, when the man in front of him is so different than who Draco is today. He’ll call him Malfoy, he decides, because that’s what Harry’d called him back then anyway—Malfoy has a bottle in his hand. The liquid in it is clear, a white wine, then. Most likely a Chardonnay. He squints at the label and realizes with a tightening of his throat that it’s the brand his father had once favored, the one that Draco is no longer able to drink.

He’s alone with himself for scarcely a minute before there’s a knock on his door.

“What is it, Mother?” Malfoy calls, standing unsteadily and stowing the wine bottle in a corner where she’s unlikely to see it.

“You have a visitor, Draco,” his Mother opens the door. It’d been one of her good days, he recalls; she’s wearing her pearls and a pale blue dress, the one that Draco had thought made her look like a fairy when he’d been young.

Sometimes he misses the days when he’d idolized his parents, back when he’d thought they could do no wrong. He misses the days when he hadn’t had to watch his mother’s eyes for sadness every time he sees her, the days when he actually had a father instead of a gravesite. And oh, that sends the familiar sensation of devastation pangs deep in his chest, but he pushes it away. He’s not here for his parents. He’s here for Harry.

He speeds through the section of the memory where he argues with his Mother about letting Harry in or not, all the way until she quietly slips out of the room. Then it’s just Malfoy and Harry, glaring at each other, and Draco watching them from the sidelines.

“You haven’t replied to my letters,” Harry says.

Draco remembers burning them, remembers taking one look at the awful handwriting and spelling each and every one into a wisp of flame.

“What of it?” Malfoy spits.

“Did you even _read_ them?” Harry nearly growls, and Draco is momentarily taken aback by the anger brimming in the set of his brow.

God, Harry looks good. Harry always looks good, but it’s been a long time since Draco’s seen this sort of fire in his eyes—and that worries Draco, hits him like a hex in the chest, because until now he hadn’t even _noticed_ just how tired present-day Harry has been lately. The past-Harry in front of him is vibrant and spitting with anger, obviously upset but still so alive, and now that Draco is comparing the two, the Harry in his time seems faded in comparison.

Merlin, what if that’s Draco’s fault?

The thought hits him like a dart to the brain, but almost immediately he knows it’s not true. It’s work, he thinks, work is the culprit that’s been dragging at Harry to no end. It’s not uncommon at all for Harry to come home with a headache, ranting about paperwork and lazy coworkers and “the bureaucracy”. Those are the nights Draco orders take-out and hands Harry the remote to the telly without asking, the nights that he pulls Harry’s head into his lap with minimal complaining and slips his hand through Harry’s mop of hair as Harry slowly relaxes. Draco usually sucks him off on nights like that, slides his hands over Harry’s naked body in a tender way that he hopes Harry understands is because he loves him.

“Fine, I’ll fucking _take it_!” Malfoy exclaims, and Draco hurriedly tunes back into the argument. “Are you happy now, Potter? You’ve got lowly Death Eater _begging_ for your mercy, is that what you wanted?”

“No! No, I—“

“Want me to lick your boots, Potter? I bet you want me groveling at your feet, don’t you, oh _Chosen One_!” Past-Draco’s voice pitches upward, sing-songy in a way that makes Draco cringe.

“Fuck you, Malfoy,” Harry spits.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Malfoy retaliates, mouth quirking cruelly.

Draco had heard the rumors at that point, the ones about secret trysts with Charlie Weasley, and oh, that’d been quite a surprise, learning that Potter had gone for the older brother of his best friend instead of the younger sister. Not that it’d lasted, obviously, and Draco feels belatedly ashamed of using it to insult Harry.

But that’s how they’d always been, insults flying across the room just like perfecting an incantation on the first try, except that the incantation is one that’s meant to punch one’s enemy in the emotional gut.

Harry’s face goes beet-red. Simultaneously, all the furniture in the room begins to rattle.

And hell—that makes Draco’s blood rush. Sometimes he forgets how charged everything had been back then, full of sparks and simmering anger. Not that they never get angry at each other, of course. They’re still capable of a good row. But most of Harry’s tension gets diverted into having sex or ranting about his job nowadays—mostly sex, Draco thinks with some satisfaction, and he supposes it’s a good thing that Harry’s learned to channel most of his frustration into something that isn’t destructive.

These days, they only break things that can be easily mended, mugs instead of feelings, tension instead of bones. It’s been a long time since something has cracked open so wide that the gap left behind nearly couldn’t be filled.

“Potter—stop! You’re going to break something,” Malfoy splutters.

The shaking in the room abruptly stops, and Harry slumps. “Whatever. Take your fucking wand,” he growls, pulling the thin handle out of his pocket and tossing it to Malfoy.

At the time, Draco had been more enamored with how snugly his wand handle fit in his palm, so much more easily than the one he’d been borrowing with his Mother. Now Draco pays more attention to Harry, to the brief flash of concern on Harry’s face as he glimpses something in the corner of the room—the bottle of champagne, half empty, had been teased from its corner when Harry’s magic had rattled the furniture about.

Draco can see the moment Harry decides not to say anything about it, can see the creasing of Harry’s brow that Draco’s past self had barely thought to note.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” Harry says snidely.

“Get out of my room,” is what Malfoy says instead.

The memory whirls away in a shifting blur of color, quickly replaced by another. Draco’s chest clenches the moment he sees himself, because Merlin, Malfoy looks even more tired than he had before, bags clear under his eyes and back hunched in a way that isn’t at all good for his posture.

If Draco recalls correctly, this would have been about a month after the funeral. Sometimes he wonders how he’d ever pulled himself out of the wall of sadness he’d faced then. Harry had helped, eventually, as had speaking with Luna once she’d gotten her Mind Healing license, but Draco prays that he never has to go through anything that sad again. He doesn’t think he could bear it.

Harry is _fine_ , he thinks sternly to himself. Harry is fine and Harry will come back. He’s just watching memories in the meantime so he can remind himself how it was, how far they’ve come in all the years they’ve been together.

He has to remind himself to focus on the memory. It’s a simple one. Malfoy is taking tea in the gardens, overgrown as they may be since Mother stopped caring for them. He’s in the middle of lazily flicking his wand to refresh the cooling charms—which doesn’t make a difference to Draco, since he can’t truly feel temperature in the memory anyway—when an owl flies down to greet him.

Draco can’t remember when he’d started actually reading the letters that Harry continued to send. He just remembers that this is the first time he’d ever replied. He watches a smile prick at Malfoy’s lips, stepping up by his shoulder to let his eyes skim over the letter. Some patches are blurry—Draco can no longer remember exactly what they’d said, and it’s reflected in the Pensieve, but Harry’s slightly self-deprecating jokes and wry humor still comes through in the snatches of letter that Draco can read. “ _Would you believe that someone on Diagon thought I was masquerading as myself the other day? They said my scar didn’t look real. I had a good laugh about it.”_

Malfoy chuckles quietly and folds up the letter. Then he Summons a piece of paper and starts a reply that Draco knows he will rewrite three or four times before finally sending it—“ _Potter_ ,” it starts, “ _They were right. Your scar doesn’t look real._ _Reckon you’ve been faking it?”_

Draco’s surroundings blur again as the memory changes, and his pulse jumps in excitement as he recognizes the next memory along the line—Malfoy is sitting in the garden for tea again, but this time the little table is set for two. He looks nervous. Draco knows all too well how nerve-wracking it had been, to sit and wait for Harry without even being sure if he would show up.

They’d owled back and forth for nearly two weeks before Draco had agreed to meet with Harry. It’d started with banter and some quarrelling and even a few snippy insults, and Draco had almost quit owling him—he remembers that night. It’s not a memory he’d like to revisit, a tense hour spent with his thoughts tumbling haphazardly around his head, overly aware that his Mother’s mental state had been on the edge of crumbling. He’d stared numbly at the parchment in front of him, willing himself to fold it up and send it—“ _Fuck you, Potter. Don’t owl me again. I mean it this time._ ”

He’d chickened out in the end. He’d left it on his desk and gone to make sure the House Elves were comforting Mother properly, and when he’d returned, he’d taken one look at the letter and Vanished it. Giving up communication with Harry would have been too much. Draco’s fairly sure it’d been the only thing keeping him sane.

In front of him, Malfoy twists to watch as Gilpy leads Harry up the path. Gilpy bows when he reaches Draco, twisting his ears uncertainly and saying, “Your guest, Master Draco. Gilpy will be bringing more tea if Master wishes.”

“Be quick about it, then see that no one bothers us afterwards,” Malfoy says, less sharply than he might’ve if Harry hadn’t been there.

“Yessir,” Gilpy bows again, snapping away and back within moments with a new teapot. He takes the old pot, flashes away once more, and then Malfoy and Harry are left sitting awkwardly at the table.

“How do you take your tea, Potter?” Malfoy clears his throat. It seems strange to Draco that he’d never noticed that at Hogwarts, considering how often they’d watched each other across the Great Hall.

“Is that a euphemism?” Potter arches a brow, and Malfoy and Draco snort simultaneously—Draco had nearly forgotten this part, actually. Pensieves are a wonderful thing.

And oh, now he remembers the rest of it, the letters that had started off with arguments and segued into apologies, slowly morphing into a different kind of letter, one that involved carefully circling around topics that Draco now knows they’d both wanted to breach. It’d been then that Harry had suggested meeting again. Draco had taken three days to agree.

“I wasn’t intending it as one,” Malfoy says, flushing.

“Oh. Hmm. Too bad,” Potter grins.

Malfoy rolls his eyes at that. “Tea, Potter.”

“No milk. Two sugars.”

“Opposite of me, then,” Malfoy remarks, flicking his wand to set the tea pouring and preparing it as Harry had requested.

“You don’t take sugar?”

Malfoy’s nose wrinkles. “It ruins the flavor, Merlin, Potter.”

“I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree then,” Harry takes a sip of his tea, but then he quickly sets it down—“Ouch. Burnt my tongue,” he mumbles.

“Use a cooling charm, dimwit.”

“Arse,” Harry glares, but it’s more playful than anything.

“You like those,” Malfoy retaliates, and it’s not a very good comeback, but it’s successful in that it makes Harry flush to the roots of his hair.

“So what if I do?” Harry responds hotly. Draco notices with amusement that he casts a cooling charm before picking up his teacup again.

And this is the most awkward part of the whole event, because Harry had just outright admitted to liking boys and Draco—Draco hadn’t been quite ready to admit that yet.

“Depends. Do you like mine?” Malfoy reclines in his chair.

Harry looks away. “Are we—really discussing this?” He looks annoyed.

“I mean—whatever, Potter. We don’t have to,” Malfoy says, clamping his mouth shut.

To this day, Draco is so, so grateful for Harry’s courage, because Harry gives Malfoy a long sigh and opens his mouth to say, “And what if I want to?”

Malfoy swallows. “Does that mean you do like me—I mean, mine?”

Harry arches a brow. “Liking you and liking your arse are two very different things.”

“I’m aware,” Malfoy huffs.

“One of them involves actual feelings, you know.”

“I _know_. You don’t have fucking feelings for me, Potter, it was a slip of the tongue. No one would even believe that anyway.”

“It didn’t sound like a slip of the tongue,” Harry sips his tea.

“It was,” Malfoy repeats stubbornly. “Why are you so—fixated on that?”

“Would you rather me be fixated on your arse?” Harry leans forward, eyes green and bright in the sunlight.

Draco knows at that point that he hadn’t been _really_ ready to admit it his sexuality to himself, let alone to anyone else, but he’d also been a lonely, horny teenager, one who’d been fairly captivated by the persuasive song coming from Harry’s lips.

So Malfoy stares back at Harry and says, “Maybe I would.”

“Maybe?”

Malfoy clears his throat. “Definitely.”

“Oh,” Harry’s eyebrows fly up. “Er—well, then. I didn’t—I wasn’t sure you were—you know.”

“How did you miss that? You certainly stared at me enough,” Malfoy bluffs in an attempt to hide that he hadn’t exactly been sure either.

“It’s not like you were— _ogling_ me. Or I, you. Although, now that I think about it,” Harry stops, snorting. “Maybe we were.”

“That wasn’t my intention at the time,” Malfoy mutters defensively, because no matter their relationship now, it doesn’t mean that Malfoy hadn’t absolutely loathed Harry in the past.

Harry licks his lips. “Oh. All right then.”

Malfoy, entranced by the flash of tongue from Harry’s mouth, says, “That’s not to say it isn’t my intention now.”

Abruptly, Harry stands, stepping around the table towards him. “Really?”

Malfoy stands too, a brazen look in his eyes, and now they’re barely a bowtruckle spine away from each other. “Really,” Malfoy replies.

Draco can _hear_ Harry’s breath hitch when Harry leans in to kiss him.

God.

Draco wants nothing more to be in Malfoy’s shoes right now, even though Malfoy is trembling as Harry presses their mouths together, but Draco is merely a spectator and this Harry is not _his_ Harry, not any longer.

He has to wrench himself out of the memory because he can’t bear to watch, because he knows without looking that his past self will slowly relax into the kiss, enough that they’ll end up in Malfoy’s bed, tangled in his sheets despite the tentativeness of their relationship. And—fuck, Draco had Harry, has had him for a long time—and now he doesn’t. He doesn’t even know where Harry _is_ and Harry hasn’t fucking owled and Draco is—

Draco is scared.

Draco’s fucking terrified, to tell the truth.

With shaking hands, he siphons the memories from the Pensieve, taking care not to disturb any of Harry’s. He lets them drift back into his brain, and it feels almost unsettling the way they nearly don’t click into place. He knows that’s absurd, knows that his memories will always fit in his mind, but his fear is making him paranoid.

He locks Harry’s office behind him when he leaves, purposefully avoiding the dining room with its warded up wine cabinet on the way to his bed.

xXx

He stops keeping track of time. It just makes him more and more anxious, and anxiety is what he needs least, especially now that he’s started having nightmares again.

He starts working on de-warding the wine cabinet. He could go out and buy wine, he knows, but that feels like a cop-out—he would rather Harry find him here, sitting in the dining room floor with his wand out, than drunk off his arse on the sofa. Every spare noise makes him twitch, knocks his concentration away, until he’s been working on the cabinet in between potion batches for nearly a week straight.

It’s nitpicky work, undoing the warding. The smallest mistake can make the wards snap back in on themselves, and Draco is eternally grateful that Harry’s not the kind of person to weave Stinging Hexes into his spells, else Draco might’ve given up a long time ago. It occurs to him many days into his work that the experience is uncannily similar to working on another cabinet, in a time and place so different that it feels like another life. He suppresses a shiver at the parallel.

It’s stupid, but Draco can’t shake the feeling that maybe if he can get the wards open, Harry will come home, will come find him and scowl and tug the bottle of wine from his hands before Draco can even think of destroying himself with it.

He does his job and sends orders off and works on the cabinet, feeling more frantic each and every day. He can’t sleep well. Dreamless sleep is too addictive to risk.

He has another dinner with Hermione and Ron, which is stressful from the beginning because he forgets to lock the crups in their cage before opening the door. It’s only a quick shield charm around the porch that keeps Orion and Cassie from bounding off entirely, nearly knocking Hermione over in the process. He reprimands all three of them afterwards and sends them to their kennels, but Leo is the only one who stops wagging his tail, and Draco’s of half a mind to take them straight back to the crup shelter they’d come from.

Dinner is a mess, a thin veil of niceties barely managing to hide the raging undercurrent of anxiety that thickly permeates the air. Both Hermione and Ron look tired, Draco thinks. He’s fairly sure Hermione’s pregnancy isn’t the only thing keeping them awake at night.

“I spoke with the department again,” Ron murmurs to Draco while Hermione’s off using the toilet. “They’re—Merlin, I don’t even know, mate. Standard missing persons guidelines for civilians say to wait twenty-four hours, I’m sure you know. Obviously that’s relaxed for Aurors on cases, especially undercover ones like this, but there hasn’t been a case that’s gone on this long past the projected end date in bloody _years_. We’ve got Seers working on the end dates, you know. I’ve never heard of them being off by more than a couple of days. And the department isn’t _doing_ anything about this.”

Draco stares at him. “Nothing at all?”

“I mean, they’ve sent someone in after them, but the bloke they sent isn’t the sharpest wand in Ollivander’s. Usually they’d be planning a full out bloody extraction at this point, especially for someone like Harry,” Ron makes a gesture that Draco takes to mean _‘you know, Chosen One and all that_ ’. “Blimey. ’Mione’s very upset with them. Hell, _I’m_ upset with them. He’s my best fucking friend and I don’t know what’s going on and—I don’t want to stress her out more than she already is,” Ron jerks his head toward the door. “But I’m fucking scared for him, mate.

Something in Draco’s stomach twists, because he realizes with a startling clarity that—Merlin. Ron is— _confiding_ in him.

This was never a conversation he was meant to be having. _Harry_ is Ron’s best friend, not Draco. Harry is supposed to listen to Ron worrying about things like this, about his wife’s feelings and an assignment gone wrong. But Harry isn’t here. Instead Draco has to console Ron somehow, has to act steady even though he feels as if his whole world is crumpling apart.

Draco hopes Ron doesn’t start asking for opinions on fatherhood. Draco thinks that he’d quite honestly vomit.

“It’ll be fine,” Draco says, but the words are hollow; he no longer believes them, and he doesn’t think Ron does either.

Ron and Hermione take their leave soon after that, murmuring in hushed voices before Draco’s even closed the door after them. He wonders if they’re talking about him, if he looks as much of a wreck as he feels, because he feels—well, numb, really. Every time he sleeps and wakes he feels number, and nothing helps, nothing—he needs Harry. Only Harry. Fuck.

He hasn’t talked to Pansy or his mother. He hasn’t had a session with Luna lately either, even though he can feel himself starting to spiral—but talking to Luna about this would make it feel real. Draco can’t deal with that, can’t deal with having to draw his feelings out and analyze them, not when Harry is going to come back as right as rain any day now. Draco’s sure of it. Harry always comes back, he _always_ —

Fuck. Draco very much wants to drink right now, but he thinks he might honestly break the cabinet if he tries to work on it in this state. Instead he tromps up the stairs, leaving their crups in their cages. He doesn’t feel like dealing with the way they’ve started trying to jump into his bed at night—they’re looking for Harry, he knows. Harry’s been gone long enough that Orion had whimpered as he’d nosed Harry’s pillow last night, and it makes Draco feel sick. They _know_. They’re already assuming the things that Draco can’t even begin to consider.

His bed is as cold as ice.

At two in the morning, he caves, stumbling downstairs and spelling the crups’ kennels open. “Come on,” he mumbles. “Bed.”

All three of them spring up faster than he expects considering that it’s so early. They’re nowhere close to being a replacement for Harry, of course, but at least his bed is a little warmer when he lies back down to sleep.

xXx

For a long period of time, Draco feels like he’s in stasis, like he’s suspended in limbo with Harry neither here nor anywhere. It’s a limbo where time is moving way too fast and Draco is stretched thin trying to pretend that it isn’t, pretending that everything is sane and normal and he’s not one wrong turn away from snapping.

And then everything happens at once.

He’s roused from his concentration on a fairly mild brew one afternoon by a ping at the wards. Moments later, he’s locked the crups away, and there’s a pair of Aurors on his doorstep, one a stern-looking female and the other a burly man who Draco wouldn’t want to cross under any circumstance.

“We have a search warrant for the home of Mr. Harry Potter,” the woman speaks without prompting, her voice a clipped monotone.

Draco really, really wants to be snotty, because if they had wanted to search his house they could have simply _asked_.

But then—well. This is new. They’re actually doing something about Harry’s disappearance. And that’s better than nothing, so really he has no choice but to cooperate. “Come in,” he says primly, resisting the urge to clench his teeth. And then, because he’s never been the best at keeping his mouth shut, he asks, “Was the warrant really necessary?” as they step into the entryway.

The man looks sheepish. “We were told that you’d give us trouble,” he admits freely, and Draco looks him up and down and is suddenly taken aback by how young he looks.

He immediately reevaluates his opinion of the man. “Of course not,” he furrows his brow. “You are investigating his disappearance, yes?”

“Yes,” the woman says, and she too looks vaguely embarrassed. “I’m Auror Hanks, and this is Auror Crone. We were assigned this morning.”

“Thank Merlin,” Draco mutters. “He’s been gone for ages.”

The Aurors exchange sidelong glances. “We’re not supposed to tell him,” Banks says quietly.

“Don’t you think he deserves to know?” Crone responds.

Draco’s brows fly up. “Deserve to know what?”

Banks gives a short sigh. “You didn’t hear it from us, but—without going into mission specifics—quite frankly, someone at the office made a mistake.”

“An ‘oversight’,” Crone says, looking very unamused.

“Honestly, it looks to me like the records were tampered with, but we won’t know that for certain until someone from Magical Signatures comes and takes a look,” Banks explains.

Draco’s mouth goes dry. “What records?”

“The assignment projection records,” Crone says softly. “The Seer who Divined the original case—it was just by chance, really, that he went back and looked. And maybe it just didn’t get logged correctly, but the case information was fairly different from what the Seer remembered predicting. The assignment end date, for one, was set to half a week ago. None of us had a clue that anything was wrong—which obviously isn’t the case,” he has the grace to look away.

Draco feels dizzy, the worry filling his stomach and spilling over until he wants to gag. “But—Weasley went to check! He asked!” he splutters indignantly, waving his arms in a motion of exasperation and worry and fear.

“Mr. Malfoy,” Banks cautions, looking almost frightened, and Draco realizes that his sleeve has ridden up. That damned Mark—fuck.

“Sorry,” he mutters, jerking the arm of his sleeve back down. They’re going to close up now, they’re not going to tell him anything else and he’s just ruined his chances at gaining any information, anything that might bring him closer to Harry coming _home_.

But Banks swallows and says, “It’s all right. I—I saw when Auror Weasley came to visit, and we all figured that he simply hadn’t been updated on the case before he’d left. And we’re not supposed to discuss open cases without the lead investigators present—it’s in the Auror handbook,” her fingers twitch nervously.

Draco groans. “Bloody _fuck_.”

“Mr. Malfoy?” Crone says.

“Yes?” Draco answers, and it comes out harsher than he’d like it to but he can’t help it right now.

“There’s more,” Crone bites his lip, and then he continues even though Banks gives him a nudge with her elbow in warning. “The risk assessment ratings weren’t correct either. They—Auror Potter and Hayes were in more danger than we’d thought. The department should have put a ton more back up measures in place,” he admits, face looking drawn.

Ever so slowly, Draco feels himself start to crack, right down the middle.

But there are people here. He can’t fall apart just yet.

He won’t—he can’t think about what that means for Harry. Instead he turns abruptly, motioning them farther into the house and stopping to introduce them to the crups. He shows them the dining room and the kitchen and points out his potions lab, but they seem to lose interest in the latter once he mentions that Harry rarely goes in. He saves Harry’s office for last since he figures it’s the most relevant, and it appears he’s right, as Crone pulls out a notepad and a quill before they’ve even fully entered the room.

“He’s warded all of his case files,” Banks sighs, investigating a stack of folders that’s sitting on Harry’s desk. “Good for him. Bad for us, though.”

“Odds are he took the important ones with him anyway,” Crone sighs.

“I reckon you’re right,” Banks moves on. “Oh, he’s got a Pensieve. It’s warded, though,” she adds, and Draco feels relieved because it’d been on the tip of the tongue to caution them against touching it. He has no idea what sorts of private memories Harry’s got in there.

It occurs to him that he hadn’t even realized it was warded. Harry’s protections had allowed him in without protest, and Draco feels a sudden rush of torturous affection for Harry, for the man who’d left his memories sitting open in a bowl for Draco to see.

He misses him. Oh, he misses him so fucking much.

When the Aurors question him later after investigating the office, he feels confident in saying that he and Harry didn’t have any glaring problems in their relationship. “No,” he says, “Harry wouldn’t have left me.” And he believes it.

It’s only as they’re leaving that he finds the courage to ask, “Why did you bother telling me about what happened, anyway?”

Crone and Banks blink at each other, eerily in sync. “It seemed appropriate,” Crone settles on finally. “You live together. You’re marked as an emergency contact, which is as good as family if you ask me.”

Banks nods along. “We wouldn’t keep that information from a family member of a missing civilian, so why would we keep it from the family of one of our own?”

Draco feels painfully aware of the tattoo on his arm. He tries to swallow the awareness away but gets choked up by the thought of _family_ —and that’s what they are, isn’t it? Even though he and Harry have never made it official.

Maybe they should. Maybe Draco should’ve said yes a long time ago.

That night, long after the Aurors had taken their statements and left, Draco Floo calls Hermione and Ron and relays the news.

“Blimey! I should’ve known the minute people started clamping up—fuck. I was assuming the case had already been put on alert, but if they thought it was within the predicted bounds—no wonder they wouldn’t tell me anything. I bet they just thought I was snooping around, cuz they had no way of knowing about the original projection date,” Ron paces back and forth in front of the fire.

Hermione looks distressed. “Did they have any sort of clues about what’s happened to him?”

“Not that they mentioned,” Draco shakes his head, feeling numb, numb, numb. “They’d just been assigned to the case.”

“Fuck, I’m gonna have to break this to _Mum_ ,” Ron moans from across the room. He catches sight of both Draco and Hermione eyeing him and his skin blazes red. “Sorry. I’m pissed.”

Draco wants to say that he’s pissed too, but every time he opens his mouth, he feels like he’s crumbling like the ashes around him. His voice dies in his throat and so he says nothing.

“How would that even happen?” Hermione asks. “How could someone mess up something so important?”

“It might not be an accident,” Ron says, his face growing hard.

“Oh _God_ ,” Hermione moans. “Ron, I just—we should be out there doing something!”

“I know, ‘Mione, but.” Ron stops and shakes his head. “We don’t even know where he _is_ , or who he was undercover as—“

“Could you get case information?” Draco asks, voice cracking, his mouth feeling dry. “Now that he’s officially missing?”

Ron looks at him, brow furrowed, and starts nodding. “Yeah, I think so. All right. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

“Once we know more,” Hermione says slowly, “I can start researching. I doubt I’ll be much use otherwise,” she sighs, patting her stomach, and Ron walks over and slings an arm around her shoulder.

“I’ll see what I can get out of the Aurors who’re on his case if they come back to investigate more,” Draco decides, looking away from their show of affection as best as he can. It makes the emptiness at his side feel so much more potent in comparison.

“All right,” Ron nods firmly. “This is good. We have a strategy.”

“Yes,” Hermione smiles feebly, and Draco has no choice but to nod along.

And it feels better to be doing something about it instead of sitting around helpless, Draco thinks, but that’s a wobbly crutch to lean on when he still can’t dislodge the lump of paranoia in his chest.

xXx

Time is moving faster, faster, leaving Draco scrambling for a foothold, but try as he might he can’t find one.

Not even twelve hours since his discussion with Ron and Hermione, Hermione goes into labor.

He gets the Floo call early in the morning, and the first thing on Ron’s lips when his head pops into the fire is, “Harry! ‘Mione’s—oh. Fuck. Right, Draco, then. ‘Mione’s gone into labor, so, um. Want to come to Mungo’s with us?”

To be honest, there are few things in the world that Draco would rather do less. But he still feels shaken from Ron’s slip-up, he’s so bloody tired from lack of sleep that he feels jittery, and he hasn’t left the house for anything beyond his usual supply runs since Harry’d left.

So maybe that’s why he says yes.

Everything afterward is a flurry of motion, filling the crups’ food bowls and getting dressed, meeting Ron and a very red-faced Hermione at the hospital. Draco’s stomach flips at the pain in Hermione’s expression as she wheezes a ‘hello’. But then they’re whisked upstairs and the birthing mediwitch casts the pain-numbing charms. It’s all rather anticlimactic as Hermione immediately relaxes, and then everyone leaves them alone and it’s just he and Ron, sitting in folding chairs next to Hermione’s bed in a hospital room.

Draco blinks. “How long does this take?”

“They said it’s an average of eight hours,” Hermione tells him. “Speaking of which—Ron, did you happen to bring any of my books with you?”

Ron shakes his head no, and Hermione sighs, but Draco stares her down. “Eight _hours_?”

“I probably shouldn’t have invited you this early on,” Ron says bashfully. “I got a bit, um, overexcited. You can go home if you want, mate.”

Overexcited had been an understatement, Draco thinks. “Well, I’m already here, aren’t I?” he says crossly. “Look. I’ll alert you if anything happens with—“ he makes a vague gesture at the round bump under Hermione’s blanket. “Go get her a book, I suppose, and then if it wouldn’t trouble you, could you drop by the Auror department as planned?”

The joy slides off of Ron’s face. “Right,” he swallows. “I nearly forgot. I’ll do that,” he nods, leaning over to kiss Hermione on the cheek.

Draco feels awful, even though Ron returns with Hermione’s books and flashes them both a smile before he leaves again. “I’m sorry,” he says to Hermione, after a long moment of silence punctuated with only the sounds of turning pages. “I’ve gone and ruined your big day.”

“It’s not a problem,” Hermione tells him, closing her book but holding her place with her finger. “I had to scold him for calling you this morning, anyway. I would’ve stopped him but I had no idea what he was going to do until it was too late. The least he can do is go talk to the department.”

“Yes, but,” Draco sighs. He doesn’t know how to convey the extent of his emotions, of the way he feels useless and like all he ever does is worry about Harry. “It could have waited.”

“Honestly, this is probably the calm before the storm,” Hermione wrinkles her nose. “Our families are going to want to visit once the baby’s here, and no doubt we’re going to have a couple of rocky weeks while we’re getting adjusted, goodness. And at any rate, I wanted to know too.”

For the first time in what’s probably been weeks, Draco wonders what the date is. He figures he ought to know the child’s birthday, especially as it seems he’s going to be here for it, so he asks her.

“The twenty-fourth of July,” Hermione says promptly. “My due date was supposed to be tomorrow, so I suppose the Seer who predicted it was somewhat accurate,” she shrugs.

“You don’t like them, right? Seers?” Draco asks, pulse racing in his fingertips. The twenty-fourth. He feels like he’s missed so much time, even though he’s been here for all of it. There’s a week until Harry’s birthday and Draco doesn’t have anything planned, doesn’t know if it’d even be proper to act as if Harry were around.

“Never have,” Hermione shakes her head. “Why?”

“Do you think they were right about the end date for Harry’s assignment?” he asks quietly.

Hermione gives him a wistful look. “I don’t know. I don’t want them to be right.”

It’s not the confirmation Draco had been looking for. He nods, staring at the dingy floor tiles, hoping for a miracle.

He’s fully expecting Hermione to return to her reading. Instead she fixes him with a worried gaze. “Draco? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says immediately.

“Really,” her lips tighten. “Draco—we’re his friends too, you know. We get it. So if you need to talk to someone…” She trails off, giving him a somber look.

Part of him really wants to complain. The other part of him hates that Hermione is the one he has to complain to, but his usual confidant has been missing for weeks and Pansy _hates_ Harry. He could call Luna, but—but.

Draco shuts his eyes. “He left me,” he says, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “I know he didn’t mean to, but that’s how it feels. And at first I was angry, but he’s gone and he hasn’t come back and I’m so bloody worried.”

Hermione sighs, her brow furrowing with sadness. “I’m so sorry. I can only imagine how you’re feeling.”

Draco balls his hands into fists, feeling suddenly like he really doesn’t want to be here, not in this chair, this hospital, not with an empty chair beside him where Harry should be. His throat tightens. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Hermione bites her lip. “Would it help to pick up some sort of hobby? I knit whenever I’m stressed. It lets me focus on something different for a change.”

“I’ll think about it,” Draco says. Bitterly, he wonders if de-warding the wine cabinet counts as a hobby.

It’s a long time before Ron comes back, and they sit in silence until he barges in.

Draco takes one look at the paleness of his freckled face and knows something is deeply wrong.

“What is it, Ron?” Hermione sits up in bed, her expression growing pinched at the movement. Selfishly, Draco hopes she’s not in pain, because if they have to call the mediwitch then Draco’s going to have to wait even longer to hear what Ron has to say.

It turns out it doesn’t matter, because Ron opens his mouth and says, “I’m so sorry. It’s really, really highly classified. I’ve got a secrecy spell on me so I can’t give out details—God, I’m so sorry.”

Draco stands sharply. “Can’t you tell us _anything_?”

Ron presses a hand to his forehead and sighs. “I think I can talk about my feelings without triggering it, as long as I don’t give details? It’s—not good. Much more serious than I’d expected, especially since Garrett’s barely out of his rookie stage. Fuck, I should be _out there._ ”

Privately, Draco agrees. But then Hermione says, “Ron, _no_ ,” and it’s not socially acceptable to disagree with her, so Draco has to tamp down the nauseating wave of frustration in his chest.

“Parenting is important,” he says shortly. He can’t look at either of them.

Of course, he can’t really blame them for this. After all, maybe if he’d been more obstinate about making Harry stay, Harry would have eventually caved.

He feels like he’s just been hit with a bludger. Should he have argued more? Fuck, he’d sulked about it a good amount, but maybe if he’d come at it more rationally, Harry would have understood.

Or maybe if Draco had agreed to marry him, Harry would have cared more about leaving him behind.

 _God_. Draco is an idiot.

“Draco?” Hermione says, making him jump. Even the softness in her voice is jarring, sandpaper against the rawness of his thoughts, and suddenly the room feels so small that it wants to strangle him.

“I can’t—I’m sorry. I need to leave,” he blurts out, and then he stumbles toward the door.

“I’m sorry, mate,” Ron says again, just before Draco leaves.

He pauses, one hand on the door handle, and looks at them, both of their brows creased with worry—Harry’s friends. Draco’s friends too, although he’s continuously unsure of how that’d happened. Maybe he should stay—but no, he’s ruining their day just by being here, he thinks.

He turns the knob. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “And congratulations.”

The trip home is a blur of Floo travel. He barely has the mental capacity to shed his travel robes before collapsing into his bed, and then he presses his face into Harry’s pillow and breathes in the scent that somehow still lingers there.

He wonders how long it’ll be until Harry’s smell fades from the bed, from his clothes, from Draco’s life.

He wishes he could sleep, even though it’s the middle of the day. He’s so tired that he doesn’t even protest when the crups come into the room, because maybe it’ll help him drift off, but all three of them fall asleep and Orion keeps whimpering and Draco can’t even doze for all the noise he’s making.

Draco can’t bring himself to be bothered by it. He feels so numb. God. Nothing matters except for the thoughts of Harry that are shooting through his brain with increasing desperation. They whittle him down to the bone until he’s squeezing his eyes shut because all of his dams have broken.

He can’t avoid it anymore.

Harry might be—

Harry might be dead.

 _Fuck._ The fear circles around in his brain, expanding until it’s the only thing he knows, the constant whispering of _Harry, Harry, Harry, where are you?_ He can’t move. He can barely think.

He lies there for hours, trapped in his own skin, until suddenly it’s too much. The bed that had once been a comfort now feels like a cage, and he slides out from under the covers, hissing at the icy feel of the floor on his bare feet.

 _Find a hobby_ , Hermione had said, so he tiptoes downstairs to work on the cabinet.

Sitting cross-legged in the floor, he brandishes his wand, He knows the beginning sequence by heart now, flicks his wand almost unthinkingly through the unweaving of the outer shell. It’s the core that’s been causing him trouble, the thick tangle of strands that are the key to unraveling the entire set of spells. The first time he tries it, it snaps back in on itself, just as it had every other fucking time he tried.

Now more than ever, this seems important, so he lets out a garbled groan and tries once more. He undoes the outer shell and reaches for the core and—

And it dissolves.

He stares at the mess of magic that’s rapidly unravelling in front of him. He’s done it, he’s figured it out, the cabinet is open—it’s not until he’s reaching for the handle that he realizes his mistake.

He hadn’t even cast the spell. The wards coming apart hadn’t been his doing.

No.

_No._

He chokes.

No, no, no, Harry, _Harry_ —

Dizzy, he slumps forward, resting his face against the cool glass of the cabinet face.

And then he starts sobbing.

He doesn’t need the Pensieve to send his memories flashing through his brain, Harry sitting at the dining room table and working on a case before dinner, Harry de-warding the wine cabinet on a particularly jovial night, the way his Adam’s apple bobs when he laughs. Draco feels it all slipping through his fingertips, except it’s not the memories that are escaping.

It’s Harry.

Merlin, maybe—maybe the wards had simply unraveled on their own, Draco thinks. He might be making too big of a deal about this, but the cabinet is open in front of him and Harry still isn’t here to stop him from drinking himself under the table.

And—and if he’s being honest with himself, hope seems futile at this point, because just then all three of the crups come running into the room, whining. He tries to push them away but they just sit in front of him, whimpering, and Draco had never heard of crups having Seeing traits but the way they’re looking at him—

“No,” Draco says, shaking his head. “ _No_. Go away. He’s fine, he’s coming back, h-he’s—fucking Merlin, it’s _fine_. I just, I can’t do this—fuck, if you knew he was gone then _why are you still fucking here_?”

Leo whines and crawls forward to nudge at his knee, and Draco barely resists the urge to smack him away.

“You’re _his_. I-I didn’t even want y-you!” Draco admits shakily, but Leo doesn’t seem to understand. “Any of you,” Draco continues, “I didn’t want a family. I just wanted—God, I just wanted him and he’s—fuck, _Harry. Fuck_. Where the hell _are you_?!”

He slams his fist into the floor, and the pain is nothing compared to the vice grip around his heart.

A sob wracks his body, and then another. He tips himself over so his head is pillowed on Leo’s body and lets himself cry, a choked mantra spilling from his lips, “Harry, Harry, _Harry.”_

_Harry._

When Draco had been very small, he’d had a pet kneazle that he’d adored. She’d always been sickly, and he should have guessed that she would die early on, but as a child, young and untainted, he hadn’t known any better.

He’d wept and wept when she died. He can still remember his mother pulling him into her lap and holding him, rocking him back and forth. “Draco,” she’d said, “Don’t fret, darling. Don’t you know that every time something fades away, something new is born to take its place?”

He’d learned the next day that his aunt had given birth the day prior.

It’s statistically unlikely that Mother’s words are true, obviously, but he’d never been able to shake the superstition, not even when years later his Mother admitted to lying just so he’d stop sobbing at the loss of his pet.

He’d almost convinced himself that it wasn’t true, all the way up until the war ended.

And then Father’s execution came and went.

Draco had searched and searched that day for a meaning to it, for something, anything to lessen his grief. He’d pored through the family tapestry for new names, growing more and more desperate when he’d realized the newest child had been born three months ago. Throat aching with sadness, he’d been about to give up when he’d wandered into the kitchen and found the House Elves in a frenzy—one of the females had just given birth.

He thinks through those events as he lies on the hard wood of the floor, wondering if any of it had been worth it.

What use is new life to Draco when means he keeps losing the only people he cares about?

The sick feeling in his chest digs beneath his skin so far that he doubts he’ll ever be able to siphon it out. He closes his eyes and focuses on happy thoughts, Harry laughing, the warmth of his arms, the coyness in his eyes when he’d proposed. Draco doesn’t think of after, of the disappointment in Harry’s expression when Draco had said he’d think about it.

He only needs Harry’s happiness. The rest he can do without, so he lies on the floor, Leo’s fur rough on his cheek, and buries himself in memories.

And at eight o’clock pm on the twenty-fourth of July, Rose Weasley is born.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All comments are extremely welcome either here or on [Livejournal](http://hd-fan-fair.livejournal.com/119914.html).


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